Franz
January 6th, 2006, 11:45 AM
AMD has had the upper-hand for over a year now, especially when talking gaming performance, so Intel has to do something and they've been focused on moving on to new technologies.
Moving from the "old" 90nm manufacturing process to the newer 65nm is one of them and Intel has now launched the first wave of Intel processors based on this new 65nm technology, named the D900 series, that's supposed to take over from the 90nm D800 series !
What we're talking about here is how small the chip is, how close together the transistors in the chip can be squeezed together so to speak - the closer together they are, the faster the data can move from one place to another, the less power the chip will need to operate which means it will generate less heat which again means you can clock it higher (or "run faster") and the production costs for each processor core will drop ! At the same time you can squeese in more transistors in a chip and thus make it either work faster or expand the cache (internal memory) which improves the performance.
http://www.tweakup.dk/images/news/8573cffb85df879b5432bfa162ce6eba1f87-big-vilmex0521.jpg
All the major hardware sites have tested, benched and reviewed these new 65nm processors and compared them to AMDs and mainly it hasn't really changed much since what Intel has done is shrink the die and not added any new technologies/techniques to how the processor works...but these new 65nm can really be overclocked and reaching 5 GHz shouldn't be a problem at all !
Shortly after the launch of the first dual cores from both AMD and Intel, AMD stated that the Intel dual core design was a "fake" and recently Intel admitted that they had sort of just "glued" two single cores together and that they had had to do that because they had a hard time keeping up with AMD...
All the hardware sites have focused on reviewing the flagship of this new D900 generation from Intel, the Extreme Edition, and it could sort of "hold its own" against AMD's 90nm dual cores but not beat them.
The "standard" D900s, ie the non-Extreme Edition chips, can barely keep up with the AMD dual cores...
Here's links to reviews of the new Intel Extreme Edition 955 :
Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/28/intels_65_nm_process_breathes_fire_into_double_cor e_extreme_edition/)
Bit-Tech.net (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/12/27/intel_pentium_ee_955/1.html)
FiringSquad.com (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_pentium_extreme_edition_955/)
Hexus.net (http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4210)
HotHardware.com (http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=758&cid=1)
XBitLabs.com (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/presler.html)
BTW default price of the top Extreme Edition chip from Intel is always $999...
Also Tom's Hardware has taken a closer look at the "normal" (non-Extreme Edition) new 65nm D900 chips - pasted from the Conclusion :
Although we did not have a retail Pentium 4 6x1 processor for review, our initial benchmark results that we recorded in October made pretty clear that there won't be any performance benefit over the 90 nm 6x0 series because there are no fundamental technical improvements. In the single-core arena, it is safe to say that AMD remains the performance king.
Looking at the dual core sector, the Pentium D 900 is able to mix things up a little bit, but it is not capable of surpassing the Athlon 64 X2's performance at all. Thanks to a 4-MB L2 cache, it can compete with the X2 in many benchmarks, but the faster X2 models remain on top. You will have to get the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 to outperform AMD's dual core top models in some disciplines, but this has to be bought at a 50% price penalty when compared to Pentium D 950.
You can see that article here (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/05/the_65_nm_pentium_d_900s_coming_out_party/).
Note : An application (like a game) has to support dual core technology to take use of it and recently a spokesperson from the game producing industry said they had no intention of adding support for dual cores anytime soon...meaning it will take years before games will support dual core... :(
Moving from the "old" 90nm manufacturing process to the newer 65nm is one of them and Intel has now launched the first wave of Intel processors based on this new 65nm technology, named the D900 series, that's supposed to take over from the 90nm D800 series !
What we're talking about here is how small the chip is, how close together the transistors in the chip can be squeezed together so to speak - the closer together they are, the faster the data can move from one place to another, the less power the chip will need to operate which means it will generate less heat which again means you can clock it higher (or "run faster") and the production costs for each processor core will drop ! At the same time you can squeese in more transistors in a chip and thus make it either work faster or expand the cache (internal memory) which improves the performance.
http://www.tweakup.dk/images/news/8573cffb85df879b5432bfa162ce6eba1f87-big-vilmex0521.jpg
All the major hardware sites have tested, benched and reviewed these new 65nm processors and compared them to AMDs and mainly it hasn't really changed much since what Intel has done is shrink the die and not added any new technologies/techniques to how the processor works...but these new 65nm can really be overclocked and reaching 5 GHz shouldn't be a problem at all !
Shortly after the launch of the first dual cores from both AMD and Intel, AMD stated that the Intel dual core design was a "fake" and recently Intel admitted that they had sort of just "glued" two single cores together and that they had had to do that because they had a hard time keeping up with AMD...
All the hardware sites have focused on reviewing the flagship of this new D900 generation from Intel, the Extreme Edition, and it could sort of "hold its own" against AMD's 90nm dual cores but not beat them.
The "standard" D900s, ie the non-Extreme Edition chips, can barely keep up with the AMD dual cores...
Here's links to reviews of the new Intel Extreme Edition 955 :
Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/28/intels_65_nm_process_breathes_fire_into_double_cor e_extreme_edition/)
Bit-Tech.net (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/12/27/intel_pentium_ee_955/1.html)
FiringSquad.com (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_pentium_extreme_edition_955/)
Hexus.net (http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4210)
HotHardware.com (http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=758&cid=1)
XBitLabs.com (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/presler.html)
BTW default price of the top Extreme Edition chip from Intel is always $999...
Also Tom's Hardware has taken a closer look at the "normal" (non-Extreme Edition) new 65nm D900 chips - pasted from the Conclusion :
Although we did not have a retail Pentium 4 6x1 processor for review, our initial benchmark results that we recorded in October made pretty clear that there won't be any performance benefit over the 90 nm 6x0 series because there are no fundamental technical improvements. In the single-core arena, it is safe to say that AMD remains the performance king.
Looking at the dual core sector, the Pentium D 900 is able to mix things up a little bit, but it is not capable of surpassing the Athlon 64 X2's performance at all. Thanks to a 4-MB L2 cache, it can compete with the X2 in many benchmarks, but the faster X2 models remain on top. You will have to get the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 to outperform AMD's dual core top models in some disciplines, but this has to be bought at a 50% price penalty when compared to Pentium D 950.
You can see that article here (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/05/the_65_nm_pentium_d_900s_coming_out_party/).
Note : An application (like a game) has to support dual core technology to take use of it and recently a spokesperson from the game producing industry said they had no intention of adding support for dual cores anytime soon...meaning it will take years before games will support dual core... :(